We have wasted our potential in modernity

For example, when I first got a permanent job as a university lecturer, I recognized that I had one of the most secure positions in one of the most secure societies in history - and that this meant I had could embark on long term projects in scholarship, writing and research and scholarship ; that my secure position made it easy stand aside from trends; that I could be a model of teaching and scientific integrity and it was virtually impossible for my employer to sack me for it!

But in general colleagues refused to acknowledge the basic privilege and security of their position, and persisted in talking as if they could be thrown out into destitution and starvation at any moment - and therefore they had to go-along-with whatever fashion, trend and politically-driven lunacies and lies were floating around the university - and work at terribly unambitious scholarly and research projects that were neither useful nor radical - but merely aspired to be microscopic incremental increases in what were already trivial and irrelevant backwaters of tedium.

His conclusion goes a bit awry, as it does with almost all religious conservatives, but before that he makes a good point: we have everything, and people do nothing. It's as if they were liberated peasants just doing what peasants do in the after hours without inventing with higher castes do.

His formerly precocious youths are now age 38, full-fledged adults who, according to Lubinski’s latest findings, have had success in a wide range of careers, from law and medicine to arts and humanities, and to engineering, business and pedagogy. Of the 320 participants, 203 earned at least a master’s degree. And 142 of them (44 percent) earned doctoral degrees, a ratio far higher than that of the average population, which adds the coveted Ph. D. initials at a rate of only 2 percent. Clearly, these kids are going places.

That’s great news, but these kids appear to have excelled despite their education. For years, teachers have operated under the assumption that gifted children – the tiny group smarter than 99.99 percent of their peers – need and deserve less attention than the kids in remedial classes. When the research team looked back at Stanley’s original assessments of classroom dynamics, they found that teachers more or less ignored gifted children, instead teaching to a one-size-fits-all curriculum that catered to the lowest common denominator.